Targeting telemetry collection to manipulate feature development
These days, most software sends data about its usage patterns back to the mothership. This collection can be quite extensive and includes what buttons a user clicks, and of course, what features are used, or not, used by customers. It might also include error messages so that they can learn what features commonly do not work correctly.
Your organization might make business decisions and start future feature development based on the telemetry information they've gathered.
What if an adversary or competitor manipulates the telemetry pipeline to cause de-investments in certain areas of your products or services?
As an example, during a red team operation at one point in my career, the team spoofed the operating system from which telemetry was sent. Instead of sending the Windows or Linux version, the red team sent millions of spoofed requests coming from a Commodore 64 up the telemetry endpoint.
The result...
